October 14, 2012

Fall is here! It’s my favorite time of year yet I feel like I haven’t really been enjoying it that much. Why not? A sudden “episode” of anxiety has seemingly come out of nowhere and hit me like a truck running over my head at 80 mph. Well, okay I guess that analogy isn’t that great because if a truck really ran over my head I would be dead right now and I’m obviously alive. But this anxiety has been really debilitating and I haven’t been living life as I should because of it. I suppose realizing that my dreaded birthday is coming up is what triggered the anxiety attack. I started thinking about my age and where I am in life and what I’ve done and more about what I haven’t done (marriage, kids, grad school, career, my art, moving abroad again, etc). And that’s been really worrying and upsetting me. I know I’ve been beating myself up, unfairly, and way too harshly. But despite my efforts to be rational and chilled-out about things, the same obsessive worries and fears and regrets keep going round in circles in my head. But I think that once I start to really make progress and improvements in at least one area of my life, these feelings will get better and go away. God, I hope so. Regret is such a miserable, self-loathsome, sickening feeling. I’ve struggled enough with it already over the years and I thought I had finally let go of some things until this latest crippling bout of it. I know regret is extremely counter-productive because you can’t go back and change things. Looking back, dwelling, getting sentimental and nostalgic to the point of extreme sadness – this has always been a problem of mine since I was a kid, really. How do you stop thinking this way? If anybody has any good tips, please feel free to share them. I’m so tired of it.

Anyway, in other good news, I just started a new photography blog – http://aclundberg.blogspot.com. I’m really happy with how it’s looking so far. Hopefully as I add more posts it will start to look more professional and will help me land some jobs or something. But despite using it as a job tool, I’ve just been having a lot of fun working on it.